“Roger, Raptor Leader; request you break off interception course to Weasel and come to course one-nine-zero, angels twenty-five. We have asked the Taiwanese Air Force to take over escort of the heavy. They have F-16 Falcons en route. My intentions are to put our F-35 and Raptor fighters between the hostiles and the reconnaissance aircraft. You are being vectored to southeast flank of Black Formation. Black Formation will have initial point.”
Franklin heard the two clicks as Johnson acknowledged the direction. He nearly laughed. Those two clicks sounded as if she was pissed off, if that was possible. Only a personality such as Pickles could show her emotions through the clicking of an acknowledgment. Pissed off at the idea that the British were directing them into the first air combat of the twenty-first century and, no doubt in his highly tactical mind, pissed that she might not be part of it.
He listened as the British Air Intercept Controller maneuvered Tight End and his wingman onto a course and altitude that would place the second Raptor formation center rear to the lead British and American fighters. The second Raptor formation was what history always called the reserve force. Reserve forces never fared well in history.
Franklin wriggled in his seat, changing his position slightly. He discovered the bravado from the officers club, the desire to shoot down an enemy fighter in the clenched-fist orgasm of air-to-air combat, had morphed into anxiety mixed with a tinge of fear. He wriggled the fingers on his hands, one hand at a time, and took a deep breath. Franklin wondered if all the pieces of his training and flight time would be the edge so when the fight was over, he’d be the one watching the other guy’s parachute open on the way to the sea. “You fight like you train,” he said to himself — the mantra of every training course he ever took.
“Bring them on,” he said softly to himself, stretching his shoulders, trying to force that feeling of confidence back into his body. “No way, Bubba,” he mumbled, thinking of his Chinese opponent.
He went through the various combat maneuvers he knew by heart. He glanced around the cockpit. This was his cockpit. He knew it as well as he knew his own body — better even because he could see every bit of the battle space. The anxiety of a moment ago became replaced by eager anticipation. He was going to kick some Chinese butt.
ELEVEN
Kiang paused outside his stateroom door. Without touching the knob, he looked at the wire in the crevice of door facing. It was still there. He pulled the key from his pocket and opened the door, glancing around the compartment before entering. Everything appeared to be where he left it. The radio was still in the middle of the table. He closed the door, making sure it was locked, before walking to the center of the stateroom. His fingers trailed across the gray-topped metal table. He leaned down close to the radio, his face almost touching the table. The radio remained within the light pencil lines that traced an outline of the corner edge of the radio.
Since that time months ago when Zeichner and Gainer had secretly searched his stateroom, he had failed to find evidence of a second entry. Didn’t mean someone had not been there to search it again, but if so, that someone wasn’t either of these two. He smiled, his lips tight. Zeichner and Gainer were a joke. Sea Base was in its last month of deployment, if you believed everything said when they set sail from Pearl Harbor. Five months with him having the run of Sea Base, photographing and gathering intelligence, and not one time had anyone questioned him about what he was doing. That stupid sailor in the crow’s nest had even asked for copies of the photographs Kiang took during the North Korean fiasco.
The only one who had ever reacted to his presence had been that master chief today who graciously ordered him be-lowdecks, giving him an excuse to… He hugged the camera to his chest. “Thanks, Master Chief,” Kiang mumbled.
Espionage was ninety percent luck and ten percent skills, Kiang had come to realize. Most of what he gathered while on board had been because of ongoing operations, combat, or just plain serendipitous luck. Luck was the true God of success.
Kiang lifted the camera and binoculars from around his neck and set them on the table. He checked the lock on the stateroom door and wedged a chair under the knob. It wouldn’t stop anyone who really wanted to come in, but it would give him the seconds he needed to destroy the evidence gathered from the Air Force office.
He went to the head, washed his hands, and then returned to the table, where he lifted the radio. He pulled the sidepiece out to reveal the hidden transmission device. Underneath the top part of the radio, using his thumb and forefinger, he found the thin wire. He pulled the wire, letting it unwind as he walked backward to the nearby electric plug-in. He wrapped the wire around the electrical cord of the tall lamp beside the recliner. Satisfied the makeshift antenna was ready, Kiang went into the head and brought the electric razor out. It took a few seconds to open the back of the razor.
He undid the cover to the camera, and within a few seconds had the camera connected to the transmitter. He pulled another wire and connected it to the operating controls hidden within the back of the electric razor.
Even if they discovered the radio, they’d find no evidence of what had been transmitted. The original method of using underwater delivery devices had failed early in the deployment, so the Ministry of State Security had gone back to the old tried-and-true method of radio transmissions.
Kiang visually checked the antenna, the operator connection, and the camera settings. The photographs would be transmitted directly from the camera. They would disappear from the camera as little bits of data, hit the radio transmit device, travel along the antenna, up the electric connections within the ship to the antenna topside of Sea Base. From there, they would burst into the electromagnetic spectrum, where the Ministry of State Security would pick up the data signal. It was a matter of seconds and not minutes before this data would be in the hands of the analysts in Beijing.
He hit the download button on the camera. The transmitter inside the radio lacked controls. External devices such as the camera provided the data, while the operation controls within the razor gave the digital instructions to tell the radio what to do. If, or when, he was captured they’d discover the transmitter, but there would be no frequencies; no controls; nothing to show what was transmitted or how. Without the camera and his electric razor, the radio was nothing but a radio with a hidden compartment filled with wires.
Kiang leaned forward and checked the digital readout of the camera. It was counting down and as he watched, it reached zero. He counted to ten, as if the espionage unit needed additional time for the data to transmit. He disconnected the radio and camera. Went over to the electric cord and disconnected the wire. He dropped the wire and watched the tiny automatic winder inside the radio retract the thin antenna wire. Then, Kiang closed the radio and set it carefully back within the pencil traces. He quickly moved the chair away from the door.
He used the head, closing the door behind him even though he was alone within his own stateroom. Coming out, the flush of the toilet filling the compartment, he put the binoculars and camera around his neck. Less than a minute later, he was out the door, heading toward the top of Sea Base.
He was toying with the idea of climbing to his designated spot in the crow’s nest. But the idea of sharing it with that sailor again appalled him. Social interaction had never been a strong suit in his limited personality arsenal. He had no way of knowing that the sailor was no longer in the crow’s nest. The sailor’s abandoned sound-powered headset lay in a disorganized heap near the foot of the ladder leading up to the crow’s nest.